No end in sight for Fukushima disaster as bureaucrats battle the laws of physics

As the famous physicist Dr. Michio Kaku said on April 4th, “The situation at Fukushima is relatively stable now… in the same way that you are stable if you hang by your fingernails off a cliff, and your fingernails begin to break one by one.” (http://bigthink.com/ideas/37705). That same article also refers to the Fukushima damage assessment by the NRC’s Nuclear Safety Team, which concluded that “cooling to the core of Unit 1 might be blocked by melted fuel and also by salt deposits left over from the use of sea water.”

That’s the same sea water, of course, that has been sprayed onto the fuel rods to prevent them from going Chernobyl. The unfortunate side effect of boiling off tens of thousands of gallons of sea water, however, is that is leaves behind a lot of salt. Japan now appears to have an abundance of radioactive sea salt that’s unfortunately caked on top of the spent fuel rods and actually preventing much more water from reaching those rods. In a sense, spraying salt water on spent nuclear fuel rods is sort of like spraying them with a slow-acting insulation. It’s only a matter of time, it seems, before that insulation make it impossible for water to keep the rods below meltdown temperatures.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry has mysteriously stopped reporting the dry well radiation reading in Reactor No. 1. Why would they do that? Because no readings are far more politically correct than extremely high readings, of course. It all happened right after an “off-the-charts” reading of radiation in the drywell of Reactor No. 1, which TEPCO officials quickly dismissed as a broken radiation gauge (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/1110…). Sure, it probably is broken by this point due to its exposure to massive doses of radiation!

The only way a drywell reading can attain such high readings, by the way, is if the nuclear fuel rods have breached their containment core.

Some of the readings coming out of Fukushima are admittedly “immeasurable,” reported NHK World: